Brain Drain

An estimated 9,000 Venezuelan scientists are currently living in the U.S.—compared with 6,000 employed in Venezuela. One of the victims is an internationally acclaimed life-sciences expert who quit his job as chief of a major research laboratory in Caracas to try his luck in the U.S. in 2002, but always nursed hopes of returning. "I sent the government a number of proposals and they never got back to me," he says, asking not to be named for fear of reprisals against his relatives in Venezuela. "Now it's all about politics. If you are not with Chávez you will never get grants. You will be persecuted. This is a war on merit." Venezuelan medical science, he says, is groping in the dark. "The last epidemiological report Venezuela published was in 2005," he says. "We don't even know what diseases we have and whether they are increasing or decreasing. This is the Cuban model, of keeping people in the dark."

The Bolivarian diaspora seems to be getting worse. Though census data are patchy, Latin American analysts say that out-migration from Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador has created sizable enclaves in the U.S., Spain, Colombia, and Central America. Panama City glistens with new buildings built by moneyed Venezuelan expatriates, who number some 15,000, up from a few thousand at the beginning of the decade. So many Venezuelans have flocked to Weston, a suburb of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, that locals call it Westonzuela. "There is hardly a middle-class family in Venezuela without a son or daughter abroad," says Fernando Rodriguez, a columnist for the anti-Chávez newspaper Tal Cual. In fact, far more people from the Bolivarian countries might be emigrating if it weren't for the global recession and rising hostility to outsiders. Venezuelan emigrants do not qualify as political refugees and enjoy no special advantage in the fierce competition for the 400,000 H1B work visas issued yearly by the U.S. for highly skilled migrants, three quarters of which go to Indians, who have an edge because they can speak English. "One reason we are not seeing more dislocation from these countries is that many people have no place to go," says Alejandro Portes, a sociologist who studies global migration at Princeton University.

Latin America has seen this before. Virtually the entire Cuban middle class fled to the U.S. after Fidel Castro's revolution, turning Miami into a business hub for Latin America while Havana moldered. The Cold War, stagflation, serial debt crises, and massive unemployment drove the brain drain through the 1980s, Latin America's lost decade, especially in Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru and throughout Central America. By the early 2000s, some of the countries convulsed by dictatorship or guerrilla insurgency, such as Chile and Peru, had managed to reverse course, making their societies prosperous and safe. But other countries have struggled to bring their expatriates home. In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia had become synonymous with cocaine, violent crime, and guerrilla warfare, all of which drove some 4 million Colombians from their homes. Targeted by kidnappers and political thugs, tens of thousands of middle-class professionals left the country. In 2002 President Álvaro Uribe declared war on drugs and crime, and now onetime bandit cities like Cali, Medellín, and Bogotá are safer than ever and have even become models for the rest of crime-ridden Latin America. Yet the brain drain has not reversed. "Either the [emigrants] have found the American Dream or they are not yet convinced that it's safe to return," says Jorge Rojas of Codhes, a Colombian think tank that tracks refugees. "It shows how difficult it can be to recover lost talent."

For the nations of the Bolivarian revolution, this means some dark days are likely to be ahead. Even the wealthiest nations could ill afford to lose their best and brightest, and Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua have all fallen in the World Economic Forum's Competitiveness Index. Fitch Ratings recently demoted Bolivia's, Ecuador's, and Venezuela's debt to junk status, while the World Bank placed all three in the bottom quarter in its ease-of-doing-business survey, along with most of the African continent.

Though much has been made of how developing-world migrants can mitigate underdevelopment by sending precious savings back home, remittances will not close the widening talent gap that is sapping societies of their ablest hands. "If a 20-something engineer or computer specialist leaves the country, who cares? But in 10 years we'll be feeling the loss," says Rául Maestres, a human-resources expert in Caracas whose son and daughter recently left Venezuela—he to work at a U.S. architecture firm, she to study advertising in Buenos Aires. "When you think about the opportunities we have lost, you could sit down and cry."

Still, there may be a glimmer of revival. Ostracized at home and unwelcome abroad, expatriate communities are trying to turn distance into strength. Using the Web, universities, and the expatriate grapevine, foreign nationals from the populist countries are talking to each other and building ties with dissidents around the world. Back home, opposition movements are making a stand, launching protest marches and candidates in a major city in each country—Guayaquil in Ecuador, Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia, and Maracaibo in Venezuela. "We are putting together a web of exiles as a counterbalance to authoritarianism," says Coronel, who is tapping the diaspora for a gathering in Ecuador or Argentina in the next few months. "You could call it a kind of Axis of Freedom." That may sound optimistic, given the stranglehold Chávez and his followers have on their countries. But considering the growing numbers and brainpower of Latin America's new dissidents, uniting their voices just might make a difference.

© 2009